“Learn them over again, then,” returned Laughlin, “and keep learning them till you’d no more do them wrong than you’d walk backward over to recitation. It’s one thing to do a thing right when your mind is on it; it’s a very different thing to do it right always, whatever your mind is on. Take a fumbling back, for example. Let a coach give a fumbler an awful rake-down before a game, and the probability is he won’t do any fumbling; but he won’t do anything else either. His mind is on the fumbling.” “I’ll do my best. What had I better try for?” “Guard,” replied Dave, instantly. “You are rather light, but I’ve had a quick, light guard keep me working my hardest to stop him. We’ve three fair tackles now, but we need a guard to play second to Butler. If you work hard through the season, you may get a chance for your ‘S’ in the Hillbury game. Well, good night. Be out at three, sure!” CHAPTER XVIII FOOTBALL Wolcott was out on the next afternoon at the appointed hour, feeling at first a little sheepish under the scrutiny of the critical crowd at the side-lines, but soon oblivious to everything except the work to be done and the directions of the coachers. On this first day the candidates practised little except the simplest elements, such as tackling and falling on the ball. The prudent coach sent them all down early, when to Wolcott it seemed as if the work had just begun. The next day the same programme was followed, the green linesman receiving in addition personal instruction from the veterans in the rudiments of line play: how to stand, how to charge, how to use the hands, or, what was perhaps more important, how not to use them. Wolcott was not altogether without experience, or he would have made little out of this amateur coaching. He kept his eyes open, however, watching the motions rather than trying to follow the words of his instructors, and seeking to learn what was most worth learning. Laughlin gave him a suggestion now and then as he went among the squads, and Lauder, the coach, devoted a few minutes to him. He did not need to be told that a guard plays close up to the centre on the offence and loose on the defence; that he must keep his head up and his play low, meet the other man harder and quicker than the other man meets him, throw himself into the enemy’s country at the earliest possible instant, and always watch the ball. All this as theory was tolerably familiar to him,—so familiar, in fact, that he almost resented being held down like a greenhorn to a primary course when he was capable of going higher. But when, after a few days, he got into his first line-up, and in five minutes of play got offside through overhaste, charged into the air, lost sight of the ball, rushed his man away from the play which he was supposed to stop, and leaped twice at a runner’s throat instead of at his shins—he despised the primary course no longer.